Review: Jerusalem by Alan Moore

Have you ever thought about how much history there is in your hometown? Have you ever thought about how interesting that history is? Have you ever thought about writing a story about that history so everyone could be wowed by it?

I’m assuming most of you reading this are Americans. Now imagine that your hometown is in Europe, and could trace people and events back thousands of years. Wouldn’t that be interesting to read about?

Do you know who would find that story interesting? NOBODY.

This is the central problem with Jerusalem. In lieu of a story, Alan Moore weaves together a fantasy pulling together the threads of history that run through Northampton and the Boroughs. Make no mistake about it – that history is indeed impressive, from the stone cross formerly buried there to the English Civil War to the strange architecture, birth of goth music, and Charlie Chaplin. However, absent a compelling story, these are just trivia.

This book is more than 1,200 pages long. When all these elements are introduced in the first part of the book, there is an understanding that they will produce something magical by the end of the book. While these threads do indeed connect (in an art exhibit), they don’t produce anything – there’s no reason that any specific events or characters were or were not included in the book, because they have no real influence on anything in the end. Basically, there’s no real reason for anything in the book to be there. Again, this book is more than twelve hundred pages long.

As mentioned above, this is a fantasy novel based around things that happened in Alan Moore’s hometown. While the fantasy elements undercut the first and last third of the book, the middle portion is pure fantasy, taking place entirely in the afterlife. Moore’s version of the afterlife is very creative, and has some of his most memorable moments (the angels playing billiards, the scarf of dead rabbits, the suicide bomber eternally stuck in his explosion, everything having to do with the demon Asmodeus). However, it is also entirely too long, entirely too repetitive, and very hard to follow. Not to mention that, again, something this significant and fantastical has absolutely no bearing on anything else in the book or any impact story-wise.

In addition to that, Moore doesn’t make things easy on the reader, especially in the last third of the book. Besides the vast array of first-person characters (most of which have no significance), there is one chapter that is written as epic poetry, and another chapter that was written with incorrect spellings that needed to be sounded out to approach actual language (full disclosure: I gave up on this chapter a third of the way through and only skimmed the rest of it). On top of all that, even three quarters of the way through this book, he would still have a character walk down the street and spend 10-15 pages on having them think things like “that used to be a fish and chips place” and “that building was the old dance school”.

With all that said, you might be wondering why I even bothered to read a book this long that I was clearly not enjoying. The reasons are faith and loyalty. For those who don’t read comics, please know that Alan Moore is an absolute genius. While you might not know it (since he won’t allow his name to be used in movie credits), he was the writer of comics such as V for Vendetta, Watchmen, and From Hell. And those are just the comics that have been turned into movies – he also did great work in comics such as Top Ten and Captain Britain. With a track history like that, even eighty percent of the way done I was expecting him to turn it around and provide a reason for having read all these disparate, confusing, and overlong nuggets about his hometown. Unfortunately, that reason never came.

If this were a 200 page book, there might have been enough individual moments to recommend this book; however, for a book this long there’s no reason for anyone to have to read it. Three out of ten hot dogs.